News, information and analysis from the black left.

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Are Jill Stein and the Greens carrying sludge for Democrats? Doesn’t the failure to seek recounts in any state Hillary won prove she and the Greens are being played? Is there a difference between the ways Republicans and Democrats steal elections? Didn’t the Green Party itself refuse to endorse the recount? And what’s this about alleging “foreign operators” being responsible for electoral fraud? Surely Greens don’t believe that nonsense.

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

The U.S. ruling class faces a crisis of legitimacy, having no solution to any of the multiple crises of capitalism. Therefore, it is compelled to lie about virtually everything, and to call speakers of truth purveyors of “fake news.” The false narrative must be maintained because “the world is outgrowing the U.S.-led, rigged economic and political system that is the last vestige of half a millennium of colonialism and white supremacy.”

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Having accepted the unacceptable and defended the indefensible when it came from Democrats, Blacks must now confront the white people’s president, Donald Trump. As in dark days of the past, we must cast off fear and cast out Black misleaders who are loyal only to themselves. “Creating political crisis should be the order of the day. That has always been the game changer, not necessarily getting Democrats into office instead of Republicans.”

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

Chicago-area businesses and a national temporary worker staffing agency conspired to discriminate against Black applicants in favor of largely undocumented Hispanic workers, according to a suit filed in federal court. “It was said to be common for managers to ask MVP to only send them workers that listened to 107.9 FM, a Spanish language radio station in Chicago.”

by BAR editor and columnist Dr. Marsha Adebayo

Frustrated and outraged at how reality has turned out, the ruling class denizens of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential tent are lashing out at truth-tellers. “Fake news” is whatever contradicts their lies, and Russia is their all-purpose boogeyman. “Google and Facebook have joined theri corporate media compatriots in an attempt to limit the public’s access to alternative news analysis and independent investigative reporting.”

by Ronald Thomas West

A bill before Congress could be used to target “any website, or blog, that does not share the mainstream media’s proclivity to serve as the Public Relations arm of a given administration.“ All they have to do is claim it is being “manipulated” by the Russians. But, Moscow doesn’t have to lie to counter a lawless U.S. foreign policy. “The Russians only need to stick to the facts (omitting the pipeline) to ultimately win the propaganda war.”

by Danny Haiphong

Fidel was a political giant, to whom the U.S. left is indebted, “not only because he and the Cuban people have protected Black revolutionaries such as Assata Shakur, Robert Williams, and Huey Newton from US government persecution.” The revolution he led built “a new society and a new people rooted in the principles of Marxism.”

by Ronnie Kasrils

Despite its 30 years of sacrifice, Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK), the armed force of the South African liberation struggle, “does not feature in school history curricula, no official films have been produced, and no military record is established.” The author, a former MK commander, proposes to comprehensively set the record straight. The following is his address at the University of Witwatersrand on “the politics of armed struggle in Southern Africa.”

by Colin Vanderburg

Rock and roll music has always been a site of struggle over issues of race and racism. In this insightful review, Colin Vanderburg surveys what Jack Hamilton has to say regarding how rock music succumbed to the lure of American racism.

Donald Trump’s Corporate Bait-and-Switch

A new report by Public Citizen shows 70 percent of Donald Trump’s presidential transition “landing team” members are affiliated with corporations. Trump’s rank-and-file supporters should be “furious that here we have corporate insider after corporate insider taking over the administration,” said Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool. Steven Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs banker slated to become Secretary of the Treasury, “is the appointment we would expect a president to have picked, if he intends to forge a plutocratic alliance” with Wall Street, said Claypool, who warned: “We can expect a return to the kind of Wild West of anything goes risk-taking that led to the 2008 crisis.”

A Movement Sorely in Need of Science

“The importance of the discussion of analysis has grown since the election,” said Nandita Chaturvedi, one of the organizers of a conference on Revolutionary Science for Radical Times, December 9 and 10, at Philadelphia’s Church of the Advocate. “You see that there is so much confusion on the left, and you see activists that are aligning with the liberal media and aligning with the Clinton machinery.” Without a disciplined political analysis, social movements lose their moorings. “In order to see clearly what we are trying to oppose, and what is the system that we are dismantling, I think analysis is really needed,” said Chaturvedi.

RICO Prosecutions as a Tool of Gentrification

“They came to my house in the pre-dawn hours with all the elements of war,” said Paula, mother of one of 120 young men swept up in a police raid centered on two housing projects in The Bronx, last April, and charged with a wide range of crimes under RICO conspiracy laws. It was the biggest such sweep in New York City history -- larger than a raid that netted 103 youths from two Harlem housing projects, in 2014. Paula has withheld her last name in fear of retaliation against her son, whose mental health has deteriorated under solitary confinement. “They are not mafia, as they are charged under RICO,” she said. “None of these youth had arsenals of firearms.” Most had no money for defense lawyers. Paula sees the raids as part of gentrification pressures to empty public housing. Many of the mothers, she said, “have their sons in jail and, at the same time, they’re going through an eviction process.

U.S. is Lying Aggressor in Syria...

The United States has no right to interfere in the affairs of other countries, period, said BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley, speaking to a gathering of the Hands Off Syria Coalition, last week. The U.S. carries out regime change under the guise of “humanitarian” intervention to “protect” people from their own government, but “the claim is always a lie, a ruse to make real the Project for a New American Century,” said Kimberley, who is also active with UNAC, the United National Anti-War Coalition. “The United States never has a humanitarian purpose in mind, in Syria or anyplace else -- any more so than it does here at home.”

...Just Like in Libya and Iraq

Michael Sampson, a co-founder of the Florida-based Dream Defenders who is now a labor organizer in the Washington, DC area, was among those that testified at a People’s Tribunal on the Iraq War, December 1 and 2, at the University of DC Law School. “The same tanks, the same police equipment, the same tear gas canisters that the war profiteers are spending billions of dollars on, are being thrown on the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore and Milwaukee and Charlotte,” said Sampson. “The wars that occur everywhere are all connected to war at home -- the war on working class people and Black and brown people. All these movements must connect. The people who colonized Iraq are the same people who colonized African Americans, here.” The Real News Network covered both days of testimony, live.

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

BAR and 12 other leftwing web sites have been put on a hit list publicized by the Washington Post. Fascists of the Democratic kind are responsible. “Had Clinton won the election, she would have begun a campaign of repression against the Left along the same national security lines as the Washington Post article, with that paper probably leading the propaganda charge.” Donald Trump isn’t the only fascist to worry about.

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

The Democrats, through their PropOrNot web site and a compliant corporate media, have targeted BAR and other sites as purveyors of Russian propaganda and partly responsible for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. We’re proud to be on their hit list. Their ludicrous neo-McCarthyism shows the Democrats are not really a party at all, but a “gigantic marketing scheme meant to keep fearful progressives in line.” And the Washington Post is revealed as a lying rag.

by BAR editor and columnist, Dr. Marsha Adebayo

In the transition to Black majority rule, the African National Congress shelved the Freedom Charter, the guiding document of the South African liberation struggle. The Charter maintained that the nation’s natural resources and land belonged to the people. Julius Malema, of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, has been charged with riotous assembly for calling on Blacks to occupy white-“owned” land.

by Danny Haiphong

Many of the folks tearing their hair out over Donald Trump’s victory were far less alarmed at the Democrats’ role in the unending wars for global domination. For them, war is a sideshow to domestic politics, even when it kills millions. They claim to be anti-racist, but “imperialist war is the truest expression of white supremacy, whether it manifests in the police occupation of Black America or the military occupation of Africa through AFRICOM.”

by Netfa Freeman

It is laughable – or pitiful – to compare Barack Obama to Fidel Castro. The fundamental truth is: “Barack Obama is the president of imperialism, PERIOD. By necessity he must be a mass murdering, lying, enemy of humanity. It is an unspoken prerequisite for that job. Fidel Castro is the opposite, PERIOD.” That’s why a long line of U.S. presidents has tried to assassinate Castro over 600 times, and committed 1,000 acts of terror against his people.

by Julian Cola

After two and a quarter centuries, legions of Americans are calling for repair of the U.S. voting system by abolishing the Electoral College. However, white liberals just “lost an election, not hundreds of years of labor, their names, languages, cultures, and customs. But they insist upon repair, a rapid solution to an age-old problem.” There is an even more fundamental structural problem in U.S. society awaiting a fix: reparations for slavery.

by Bill Quigley

Never in living history -- not even when Ronald Reagan won the White House -- have activists been so visibly distraught. The author has gathered some suggestions for coping with post-election trauma. “We need to stay centered, to foster actual human connection and build a shared commitment to struggle together.”

by Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles

Gains in Black educational levels have been largely nullified, according to the authors. “The economic benefits that should have come from the substantial gains in education for black men over the past 75 years have been completely undone by the changing economy.” Joblessness is built into the system. “In 1960, 19 percent of black men were not working; in 2014, that number had grown to 35 percent of black men,” including those in prison.

GOP Plans Stealth Attack on Medicare

Republicans in Congress have “never really liked Social Security or Medicare” because the programs “work and they completely go against the ideology that the private sector is always better,” said Nancy Altman, co-director of Social Security Works. The GOP will act “in the dead of night, so the people don’t know what’s happening,” and sneak a privatization bill into a “reconciliation” measure that “the Democrats can’t filibuster,” Altman predicted. “They want to give seniors and people with disabilities a check and say, ‘Good luck, go out and get private insurance.’”

What Do You Mean by Identity Politics?

Lots of people talk about how “identity politics affected the election, but the term is never specifically defined,” said Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Houston. “As you tease out the rhetoric, it appears to suggest that organizations like Black Lives Matter is identity politics, and people protesting against being shot down in the streets by officers of the state is identity politics.” The only good news to come out of the election, said Horne, “is that Donald J. Trump will probably prove to be the Gorbachev of the United States of America” by accelerating the decline of U.S. imperialism and white supremacy.

2016 was Bound to be a Bad Year

The “panic and hysteria” of some Hillary Clinton supporters “is really very childish,” said Diana Johnstone, author of Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. “The fact is, there wasn’t going to be a good outcome to that election, anyway; you had two terrible candidates, so you should have been prepared for that.” The Democrats crazily search for Russians behind every web site. “The idea that Russia interfered with the election is absolutely absurd,” said Johnstone, speaking from her home in Paris. “It sounds to me like they’ve decided they’re going to make war against Russia -- and they’re all into that,” including the media.

President Obama’s Hollow Legacy

Barack Obama was “beloved” by large numbers of Black people, but it was a one-way affair. “Politicians score points with white people by assuring them they’re not going to do anything for Black people, and Obama was no exception,” said Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley. “In order to win, Black people have to be thrown under the bus.” Obama “gave white people a message that he would not in any way upset the status quo,” said Kimberley, speaking on the Taylor Report on CUIT radio, in Toronto, Canada. “His is a hollow legacy.” Hillary Clinton lost because “you can’t transfer one person’s popularity to another.”

Peltier on Standing Rock Protests

One thousand people took part in the 47th annual Native American National Day of Mourning, last Thursday, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Placards declared “We Are Not Vanishing” and “We Are Not Conquered,” as an Elder read a message from political prisoner Leonard Peltier, the American Indian Movement activist who has been locked up for the past 41 years. The Standing Rock protests “are the greatest gathering of our people in history, and has made us more connected than every before,” said Peltier. “Water is life, and we cannot leave this issue to our children and grandchildren.”

Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network is hosted by Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey. A new edition of the program airs every Monday at 11:00am ET on PRN. Length: one hour.

Jesse Jackson Calls for Clinton Pardon But None For Manning, Shakur, Peltier or Political Prisoners

by the Real News Network

Rev. Jackson displays loyalty only to himself and his patrons. In his eyes political prisoners like Mutulu Shakur, Leonard Peltier, Chelsea Manning or Rev. Edward Pinkneydon't deserve pardons, but Hillary Clinton does.

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by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

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